ABSTRACT

Indigenous worldviews are increasingly hailed as decolonial solutions in efforts towards the creation of sustainable futures in different contexts. But what exactly are Indigenous worldviews in contemporary contexts shaped settler-colonial capitalism? One interpretation to that question can be found in large-scale real-estate developments that are pursued the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations in what is now Vancouver, Canada. While such developments display “Indigenous” design features, they also use the notion of “Indigenous stewardship” to “green” large-scale development for the purpose of maximum value extraction. Does Indigenous knowledge in this context only refer to features of the developments’ design or to a broader understanding of how to navigate settler-colonial space through capitalist real-estate development? By raising such empirical examples, this paper contributes to the debate around the usage of Indigeneity in the propagation of sustainable futures. It raises questions around the delineation of “Indigenous knowledge” as a category highlighting that Indigeneity is intrinsically intertwined with the capitalist economy and its contradictions. Contemporary Indigenous worldviews “are not reducible to capitalism’s side-effects” (Radcliffe, 2020: 375) but shaped their “entanglements with colonial formations” (Pasternak, 2015: 187). Indigenous actors aren’t always looking for non-capitalist alternatives, and notions of Indigenous knowledge should thus not delineate it as the Other to modernity and exchange value. How can a decolonial interpretation of Indigenous knowledge look like that neither depicts Indigenous peoples as an innocent part of primordial nature, nor simply incorporates Indigenous values as a feature of green capitalism?

Literature

Pasternak S (2015) How capitalism will save colonialism: The privatization of reserve lands in Canada. Antipode 47(1): 179–196. DOI: 10.1111/anti.12094.

Radcliffe SA (2020) Geography and indigeneity III: Co-articulation of colonialism and capitalism in indigeneity’s economies. Progress in Human Geography 44(2): 374–388. DOI: 10.1177/0309132519827387.

ABSTRACT

On the Agency of Indigenous Objects

In 1995, Arun Agrawal warned against resolving the dichotomy of indigenous versus scientific knowledge and instead called for ‘greater autonomy for indigenous peoples’ (p. 413). By the late 2000s, sustainable development’s greenest commodity of ‘indigenous knowledge’ was articulating indigeneity and its relation to power (Agrawal, 2005). As climate change adaptation literature now saturates itself with theorizations on ‘the government of things’ (Lemke, 2015, 2017; Barad, 2007), new materialism finds its decolonial calling. As commitments to decolonizing knowledges grow, decolonial practices themselves are informed an ontological overenthusiasm of a contemporary world where ‘agency flourishes’ (Rekret, 2018, p. 64). This world however lacks the urge to question how agency is generated in and may be extracted within social relations. This paper explores how this overenthusiasm translates as the valorization of an ‘inner logic’ of the indigenous peoples central to climate adaptation research, to whom agency is merely loaned. Our scholarship turns to Nepal, where on-going forms of coloniality refuse to be acknowledged as colonial. There, we interrogate how indigenous knowledges hailed as climate action and justice solutions continue to be produced within state’s authoritarian forms of power (resurrected through caste, class, and gender hierarchies) central to the governmentalization of a capitalist state patriarchy. This paper draws much needed attention to how haphazard calls for decolonization further abstracts indigenous peoples, knowledges, and labour that ultimately become ‘an alibi’ (Rekret, 2018, p. 65) for capitalist control.

References:

Agrawal, A. (1995). Dismantling the Divide Between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge. Development and Change, 26(3), 413–439. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1995.tb00560.x

Agrawal, A. (2005). The Politics of Indigenous Knowledge. Australian Academic and Research Libraries, 36(2), 71–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2005.10721249

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway : quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning (pp. XIII, 524). Duke University Press.

Lemke, T. (2015). New Materialisms: Foucault and the ‘Government of Things’ Theory, Culture & Society, 32(4), 3–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413519340

Lemke, T. (2017). Materialism without matter: the recurrence of subjectivism in object-oriented ontology. Distinktion (Aarhus), 18(2), 133–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2017.1373686

Rekret, P. (2018). The Head, the Hand, and Matter: New Materialism and the Politics of Knowledge. Theory, Culture & Society, 35(7-8), 49–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418806369

ABSTRACT

In line with the growing consensus around the “usefulness” of plural knowledges (see e.g. recent IPCC reports), many attempts have been made to include indigenous and local practices in climate services and ‘climate smart’ interventions, facilitated the digital turn in climate adaptation.

Drawing on examples gathered the global mapping conducted the Digital Climate Futures project, the paper scrutinizes and classify forms in which indigenous and local knowledge have been included in climate adaptation interventions at the intersection with digital technologies. Our analysis shows the reductionism and extractivism underlying many ‘inclusions’ of different knowledges, which results into their reduction into data to be weaponised in frameworks, reports, and models, and their generalization into solutions to be added in adaptation repositories and expected to be scalable and benefit different contexts. Through processes of datafication, plural epistemologies that do not align with the hegemonic production of knowledge around climate change are reified into data to serve the dominant epistemology and support the production of a certain understanding of risk. Rather than learning to think otherwise, and accepting the structural changes that this entails, many interventions result in the assimilation of alterity into the adaptation machine.

ABSTRACT

An enormous amount of labour is being undertaken in equatorial regions to adapt to the effects of climate change. This labour is often unpaid, hazardous, and carried out under conditions of environmental violence that in postcolonial nations draw parallels with historic forced labour and colonial violence (Burns, 2019). In the South Pacific, these parallels come together in the contemporary livelihoods and community histories of the Australian South Sea Islanders and the Indo-Fijians, and the South Pacific sugar industries. Endemic to the South Pacific islands, sugarcane has been intrinsic to the region’s Indigenous culture, colonial expansion, nation-building, and the modern economy. The indentured labour histories of the region’s sugar industries are contested scholars and activists, pitting the histories of oral-based peoples against 150 years of whitewashing. The cane fields of both Australia and Fiji remain controversial sites of racialised agrarian reform. 

While sugarcane is exceptionally resilient – the only tropical crop resilient to the region’s increase in category five cyclones – extreme weather radically changes industry labour conditions. The labour involved in growing cane in Australia and Fiji is now failing to meet the decent work indicators set the International Labour Organization. Through historical, ethnographic, and collaborative qualitative research, I compare historical and contemporary labour conditions and test the concept of adaptation labour (Burns, 2021; Johnson and Mikulewicz et al., 2023; Burns and Thornton et al., 2024) as a new framework for analysing adaptation justice in the South Pacific sugar industry.

ABSTRACT

One of the promises of ‘smart’ adaptation measures is its alleged ability to enable the participation of ‘end users’ and communities, mobilising local knowledge, and leapfrogging technical and economic obstacles. Whether this is actually fulfilled deserves scrutiny, and here the question of cognitive justice becomes key: when an inevitably situated and hegemonic understanding of digital climate services is mobilised in the Majority World to reach out to smallholder farmers and other groups at the fringes of globalised culture and capital, it is imperative to look for forms of ‘digital colonialism’, entailing the exclusion and/or assimilation of forms of knowledge, worldviews and values from the framing of the main issues. It is also key to understand how communities navigate, reshape and resist these digital interventions. 

This paper engages with these themes through an empirical study of digital adaptation initiatives in the Indian state of Bihar. Having a large proportion of people dependent on climate-sensitive livelihoods (Kumar, 2021) and facing extreme vulnerability to climate change (Dasgupta et al., 2020), Bihar has received a considerable amount of attention on climate services and digital adaptation initiatives (see for example, the climate-smart agriculture initiative pioneered CGIAR). Ranging from farm activities to important poverty reduction schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), the synergy between adaptation and the digital has become pervasive.  Presenting insights from an exploratory phase of fieldwork, the paper offers insights into how users and communities engage with, co-design, employ, and resist such applications, in a society where landownership, access to employment, resources and technologies are deeply fraught along the lines of caste, gender, and ethnicity.